The Word "Hacker" - Paul Graham

A philosophy paper consists of the reasoned defense of some claim

From about 32 kya to 22 kya, prevailed in Europe. That culture produced the and art such as the . By 20 kya, . But as far as human expansion is concerned, the Gravettian (and related cultures) are most notorious as mammoth hunters extraordinaire for those that lived on the near the ice sheets. To , they could not swim to Sahul, but flourished everywhere else they could get to. At , they were the ultimate hunter-gatherer kill. Also, near the ice sheets, meat could be stored in the ground. Cro-Magnons did just that, and that “freezer” full of meat led to the first seasonally sedentary humans. It long predated the Domestication Revolution when people could be sedentary year-round, but while the megafauna lasted, the first signs of what came later appeared as Cro-Magnons created villages around frozen mammoth meat. Gravettians hunted along migration routes and set traps and ambushes for mammoths. For thousands of years, mammoths were the primary focus of Gravettian hunters, and many scientists believe that humans at least . Gravettians probably used the bow and arrow, and using poisoned arrows on mammoths would have been child’s play, not a hazardous undertaking. They also tended to focus on the easy meat: the young, relatively defenseless, tender mammoths. Killing the offspring alone would have driven the slowly reproducing mammoths to extinction, and as the interglacial period began around 15 kya, there would have been new pressures on mammoths. One of them was that fewer mammoths meant that they were not terraforming their environments like they used to, and the warming climate probably reduced their range. For a mammoth facing humans, there was literally no place to hide (except maybe in the living room), and there is little reason to think that hunters would have eased up when mammoth numbers dwindled. If anything, their efforts would have to get the last ones, as they competed and fought over the final mammoths. In one lifetime or even several, the changes would have been barely noticeable, if at all. There was simply no way out for mammoths, and they went extinct south of the European ice sheets under the ministrations of Cro-Magnon hunters. More evidence of their fate is some mammoths surviving in refugia: islands where humans did not arrive until thousands of years later. mammoths survived on in the chain off of Alaska until less than six kya, and went extinct when humans arrived. Several hundred apparently full-sized mammoths survived on near Siberia and went extinct less than five kya, when humans arrived. In today's France and Spain, Gravettians also semi-settled along the migration routes of reindeer and red deer. From Spain across Europe, into today's Russia, Gravettians hunted migrating herds, and not only the mammoth was driven to extinction, but also the wooly rhino, the Irish elk, the musk ox, and steppe bison were driven to extinction as the ice sheets retreated. Neanderthals had been ambush hunting in similar fashion, and those animals, like the African megafauna, grew wary of humans, and killing those animals probably took planning and guile.

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Some scientists treat every proboscidean extinction as a unique mystery, unrelated to other proboscidean extinctions, and climate and resulting vegetation changes are hypothesized as agents of extinction (or other causes invoked), when the most probable cause stares at them each morning in the mirror. The devil in the details, but regarding the megafauna extinctions, some specialists cannot seem to discern a very clear pattern. Scientists, because they are human, have an inherent conflict of interest when attributing such catastrophes to non-human causes. During the remainder of this essay, it will become evident that there is a human penchant for absolving one’s in-group of responsibility for catastrophes and crimes committed against the out-group, and , scientists, and other professionals regularly engage in such interest-conflicted acts, whether they were defending their species, race, gender, nation, class, ideology, ethnicity, or profession. That in-group/out-group difference in treatment has a long history and probably goes back to the beginnings of territorial social animals.

One major problem with making a positive impact on a global level, ultra-elite machinations aside, is that almost nobody focuses on what is important, which I hope to help remedy with this essay. Almost everybody hacks at branches if they hack at all. Conspiracists tend to obsess on elite machinations, which is an exercise of dubious benefit to begin with, but they often become paranoid and also confuse retail elites or other interests with the GCs. Bill Gates and David Rockefeller are probably not members of the GCs’ organization. Also, I learned that ultra-elites can only play their games with the responsibility that almost all people have abdicated as they play the victim. The GCs are only a symptom of our malaise, not a cause. They cannot be beaten at their game, and it is counterproductive and can even be suicidal to try. Making them obsolete is probably the best that we can do. While conspiracists often fixate on ultra-elite machinations, intellectuals, academics, and scientists tend to deny that such activities even exist or are meaningful. It took me many years to understand their resistance to even acknowledging ultra-elite existence, and I think it partly relates to the mainstream scientific worldview that . They have an ideological aversion to the notion that anybody manipulates events on a global scale, and believe that what seems conspiratorial is only anarchic elites competing with each other, which is like Darwin’s view of evolution. They believe that conspiracists see a pattern where none exists, or that the situation can be explained without invoking conscious intent, like materialistic hypotheses of how the universe operates. Radical leftists have to the of such elites; such an idea scares them. Neither obsession nor denial helps people attain productive understandings of the issue. Conspiracists and structuralists are united in thinking like victims, and that, as I see it, . Until they relinquish thinking like a victim, they will not constructively engage the critical issues that humanity faces, and energy ranks above all else. Victims are reactive instead of proactive, and only and resulting action has a prayer of working, in my opinion.

This chapter falls at about this essay's midpoint, and humanity's role in this story has yet to be told. As I conceived this essay, studied for it, wrote it, edited it, and had numerous allies help out, an issue repeatedly arose regarding the half of this essay just completed, and can be summarized with: "What was the point?" Not everybody asked it and some understood, but others wondered openly and sometimes subtly what the purpose of this essay's first half was (and some asked if the essay had any point at all and considered my effort a waste of time). This chapter is my reply, and I think it is important to understand.

The (c. 5.3 to 2.6 mya) began warmer than , but was the prelude to today’s ice age, as temperatures steadily declined. An epoch of less than three million years reflects human interest in the recent past. Geologically and climatically, there was little noteworthy about the Pliocene (although the was created then), although two related events made for one of the most interesting evolutionary events yet studied. South America kept moving northward, and the currents that once in the Tethyan heyday were finally closed. The gap between North America and South America began to close about 3.5 mya, and by 2.7 mya the current land bridge had developed. Around three mya, the began, when fauna from each continent could raft or swim to the other side. South America had been isolated for 60 million years and only received the stray migrant, such as rodents and New World monkeys. North America, however, received repeated invasions from Asia and had exchanges with Europe and Greenland. North America also had much more diverse biomes than South America's, even though it had nothing like the Amazon rainforest. The ending of South America’s isolation provided the closest thing to a controlled experiment that paleobiologists would ever have. South America's fauna was devastated, far worse than European and African fauna were when Asia finally connected with them. More than 80% of all South American mammalian families and genera existing before the Oligocene were extinct by the Pleistocene. Proboscideans continued their spectacular success after leaving Africa, and species inhabited the warm, moist Amazonian biome, as well as the Andean mountainous terrain and pampas. The also invaded and thrived as a mixed feeder, grazing or browsing as conditions permitted. In came cats, dogs, camels (which became the ), horses, pigs, rabbits, raccoons, squirrels, deer, bears, tapirs, and others. They displaced virtually all species inhabiting the same niches on the South American side. All large South American predators were driven to extinction, as well as almost all browsers and grazers of the grasslands. The South American animals that migrated northward and survived in North America were almost always those that inhabited niches that no North American animal did, such as monkeys, (which survived because of their claws), and their small cousins (which survived because of their armor), , and (which survived because of their quills). The opossum was nearly eradicated by North American competition but survived and is the only marsupial that made it to North America and exists today. One large-hoofed herbivore survived: the . The (it weighed one metric ton!) survived for a million years after the interchange. , that , also survived and migrated to North America and lasted about a million years before dying out. In general, North American mammals were , which resulted from evolutionary pressures that South America had less of, in its isolation. They were able to outrun and outthink their South American competitors. South American animals made it past South America, but none of them drove any northern indigenous species of note to extinction.

But the African Oligocene event of most interest to most humans was African primate evolution. By the Eocene’s end, primates were extinct in Europe and North America, and largely gone in Asia. Africa became the Oligocene's refuge for primates as they lived in the remaining rainforest. The first animals that evolved in the late Eocene, and what appears to be a appeared in Africa at the Oligocene’s beginning, about 35-33 mya. But ancestral to that creature was one that also led to those that migrated to South America, probably via vegetation rafts (with perhaps a land bridge helping), around the same time. Those South American monkeys are known as today and they evolved in isolation for more than 30 million years. For those that stayed behind in Africa, first appeared around the same time as those New World monkeys migrated; they diverged from . Scientists today think that somewhere between about 35 mya and 29 mya the splits between those three lineages happened. Old World and New World monkeys have not changed much in the intervening years, but apes sure have.

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are created by undisturbed organism remains that become saturated with various chemicals, which gradually replace the organic material with rock by . Few life forms ever become fossils but are instead consumed by other life. Rare dynamics lead to fossil formation, usually by anoxic conditions leading to undisturbed sediments that protect the evidence and fossilize it. Scientists estimate that only about 1%-2% of all species that ever existed have left behind fossils that have been recovered. Geological processes are continually creating new land, both on the continents and under the ocean. Seafloor strata do not provide much insight into life’s ancient past, particularly fossils, because the process in “mere” . The basic process is that, in the Atlantic and Pacific sea floors in particular, oceanic volcanic ridges spew out basalt and the plates flow toward the surrounding continents. When oceanic plates reach continental plates, the heavier (basaltic) oceanic plates are subducted below the lighter (granitic) continental plates. Parts of an oceanic plate were more than 100 mya and left behind plate fragments. On the continents, however, as they have floated on the heavier rocks, tectonic and erosional processes have not obliterated all ancient rocks and fossils. The oldest “indigenous” rocks yet found on Earth are . have been dated to 3.5 bya, and fossils of individual cyanobacteria have been dated to 1.5 bya. There are recent claims of finding . The oldest eukaryote fossils found so far are of . The first amoeba-like vase-shaped fossils date from about 750 mya, and there are recent claims of finding the first animal fossils in Namibia, of sponge-like creatures which are . Fossils from might be the first animal fossils, and some scientists think that animals may have first appeared about one bya. The first animals, or , probably descended from . The is a tail-like appendage that protists primarily used to move and it could also be used to create a current to capture food. Flagella were used to draw food into the first animals, which would have been sponge-like. When the first colonies developed in which unicellular organisms began to specialize and act in concert, animals were born, and it is currently thought that the evolution of animals probably only happened . In interpreting the fossil record, there are four general levels of confidence: inevitable conclusions (such as ichthyosaurs were marine reptiles), likely interpretations (ichthyosaurs appeared to give live birth instead of laying eggs), speculations (were ichthyosaurs warm-blooded?), and guesses (what color was an ichthyosaur?).

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Since the most dramatic instances of speciation seem to have happened in the aftermath of mass extinctions, this essay will survey extinction first. A corollary to is that if any critical nutrient falls low enough, the nutrient deficiency will not only limit growth, but the organism will be stressed. If the nutrient level falls far enough, the organism will die. A human can generally survive between one and two months without food, ten days without water, and about three minutes without oxygen. For nearly all animals, all the food and water in the world are meaningless without oxygen. Some microbes can switch between aerobic respiration and fermentation, depending on the environment (which might be a very old talent), but complex life generally does not have that ability; nearly all aerobic complex life is oxygen dependent. The only exceptions are marine life which has adapted to . Birds can go where mammals cannot, , for instance, or being , due to their . If oxygen levels rise or fall very fast, many organisms will not be able to adapt, and will die.